Well, there I was, drinking my coffee and making sure I kept my brand polished and up-to-the-minute as all of todays artists must do, which is to say I was procrastinating on Twitter, and I come across this photo, courtesy of The Drew Barrymore Show, a daytime endeavor that I actually have never seen, but still follow, because, well more on that in a minute:
It’s Drew Barrymore wearing glasses! Maybe you’ve seen this before and you have no idea why I’m freaking out, but if you’ve read my last newsletter you understand why the women I admired most as a teenager wearing glasses is a big fucking deal, at least to me personally. And Drew, well — before I go on, I need to quote one of my favorite lines from a book that I always hesitate to tell people is one of my favorites, as in I have read it more times than I can count, I might read it again in a couple days: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. In it, the narrator Rob Fleming, whom I really wish I couldn’t relate to but in reality has, for decades, made me feel seen to a depth that ultimately hurts, is making a passing reference to the actress Susan Dey, and he says:
“If I know Susan Dey, and after a relationship of twenty-five years I would say that I do….”
Rob is not referring to a celebrity encounter he’s had with the actress who started on The Partridge Family and went on to L.A. Law. What he means is, his not-always-beneficial imagination has kept him in a personal dynamic with his many ideas of Susan Dey for decades. He’s pathetic! None of us want to be Rob Fleming, but some of us are, we just are. (We can only hope to be as funny; his wit and sense of humor are his only saving grace). Moving away from the fictional record-store-owning curmudgeon, though, and back to my relationship of more than 20 years with Drew Barrymore —
There’s probably a school of thought that says that no Hollywood actress unabashedly displaying her body can be inspiring for someone whose body broadcasts NEVER FORGET YOUR MORTALITY OR THE TERRIFYING FACT THAT YOU COULD BE INJURED AND DISABLED AT ANY TIME to too many people. (By which I mean, for everyone who looks at me and thinks “nice tits,” which enough people have been vocal about since their debut that I know it’s a thing, there are some number of people who look at me and Get All Scared and force their children to look away). But Drew Barrymore was only Hollywood’s darling, real darling, as in everyone was warm toward her, when she was little, as in this iconic appearence on the The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson when she was promoting E.T.:
After that, shit got difficult, as she bravely details in her memoir, Wildflower, the audio version I highly recommend (especially if you have a thing for Los Angeles vocal fry, which I rather do. Drew, it turns out, hates her voice, and long resented the fact that she moved to Sherman Oaks, CA, early enough to develop the unduely-maligned vocal fry. “Every time I hear my own voice in a meeting,” she says, “I think to myself, ‘fucking Sherman Oaks.’”) By her 20’s, though, she had carved out a meaningful career for herself, by her own account playing characters so wholly relatable to her that she didn’t consider herself an actress. That will be explained in this clip if you watch it (you should watch it) but for our purposes, we need to go back to that moment on David Letterman when she did an impromptu erotic dance and bared her breasts, for just one second, because it was Letterman’s birthday and she’s always had a crush on him. (“He’s smart and funny,” she explained in her memoir, which should give hope to someone as it has to me):
Ian’s no Drew fan, but when I showed him this, he said “oh wow, she is really cute.” Damn right. More to the point though, there was something about her joyousness, her utter control and lack of passive objectification, of passive anything, that would make a deep enough of an impression on me to help me realize, by 22, that female exposure could be a power move, a form of assertion. Drew likely wouldn’t describe herself as asserting anything here, this was an implied birthday gift, but in Wildflower she draws our attention to the expression on her face immediately after. One of the many thoughts she says was going through her head right then was, “am I in trouble?” But she wasn’t. Because contrary to every notion of femaleness or bodies or sexuality or human interaction that has ever gained traction in America, breasts don’t fucking hurt anyone.
I’ve told this story once as a performance and once in an unpublished essay. It’s not one that often comes up in casual conversation. But during a wild three-month period as an aspiring stripper when I was 22, I fell into a deliberately rebellious habit of upping my hippie-background-driven “no underwear under long skirts” policy to include really short dresses. (For the curious if there are any, I don’t do this anymore, at this time of writing) One day, I was walking in Iowa City in a favorite of one of these dresses, it was a sundress with a green and white print and straps that looked like they could be easily bitten away. It was Spring, and Spring really means something, and does something, when you’ve endured the true-Hell punishment of an Iowa winter.
I was crossing the long bridge that led from one side of campus to the other over a freeway, and an absurd group of yellow folders materialized near me: yellow is the bastardization of the Gold that’s supposed to be the Black and Gold of the Hawkeyes, the football team that no one I respected gave two shits about. Visiting groups of high school seniors considering Iowa for the reputed best years of their lives were often gathered in bumble-bee-looking clusters behind some cartoonishly-Iowa-looking tour guide. Hair golden as a ripe ear of corn, eyes blue as the sky in Field of Dreams. (If such a dude is your type, head to the Student Union, formally known as the Iowa Memorial Union, on the University of Iowa campus. Passing by, a friend once inquired, “Why is there always a half-naked guy outside of the IMU?” Some unwritten law says shirts are forbidden while playing Frisbee.)
While the bumblebees and moms in the group listened intently to the guide, one person looked straight at me. Had it been one of the seniors, I’d have practiced my Mrs. Robinson smirk and gone on my way, but it wasn’t: the one person looking at me was a dad, and he was no silver fox. Dude was gross, really gross, and made all the grosser by the shameless and unrelenting way he was undressing me (wouldn’t have taken long) with his eyes. I knew he thought he had the power here, because there was no way I, a young woman in proto-stripper-garb, was going to call him out when he wasn’t even saying anything. And I didn’t call him out exactly. Except, calling on the healing and fearless powers of Drew, I kinda did.
After making prolonged eye contact with his pervy ass and making sure I saw what I deeply felt I saw, I yanked down the straps of my dress (no one who doesn’t wear underwear wears bras) pulled them all the way down so I was now topless in a miniskirt, and marched straight into the middle of the bumblebees. “THIS is why YOU should come to the UNIVERSITY OF IOWA!” I announced. Most vividly, I remember the wife of the pervert, whose eyes were bright, and who was laughing hysterically. (A second-wave feminist once suggested to me that she was laughing out of hurt nervousness, but my intution was on point in those days and that was not the impression I got. Lady knew who she was married to better than I did, and while I can’t explain the solidarity we were feeling, I know without a doubt that it was there.) I said some other stuff I can’t remember as I theatrically walked the length of the bridge, ending with, “It is the best, the BEST, the total best.”
The Iowan tour guide, representing his state norms to the hilt, addressed the group with a hearty, “oh-hohhhhh-KAY!” and that was all I heard before I reached the other side of the bridge, pulled the top of my dress back up, and headed home. When I walked in the door, I took my white landline phone off it’s cradle and called my best friend to tell him what I’d just done, and we said nothing, just laughed and laughed, kinda like the guy’s wife, for a long time. (I wish I knew where that kid ultimately chose to go to college.)
Despite what people say about Mrdi Gras, “Show me your tits” isn’t really a thing, at least not for New Orleans natives, because bare breasts get covered with beads so quickly by grateful strangers that it immediately elevates the practice to a Goddess offering, something decadant and spiritual, a favorite combination for New Orleans traditions. All that is to say that despite my blood and heritage, I had no point of reference for breast-baring being a big deal: it definitely wasn’t in the ultra-hippie New Mexico circles that my mother travelled in. And all that is to say, I owe Drew.
I suspect I’m not the only vulva-having person out there who turned to Drew Barrymore for inspiration, validation, and the occassional never-discussed sexual fantasy at various moments of development. When I found out, recently, that she considers herself more or less bisexual because she’s been with women and men, I was furious that no one had told me this, catapulting immediately back into teenage logic that says one circumstantial factor will inevitably bring you together, the same way that my closest friend in 8th grade believed she and Justin Timberlake could be together because, unlike our previous celebrity crushes, Brad Pitt et. al, “he’s only seventeen.” (Little about being a teenager is actually enjoyable, but I do occassionally miss that unshakable belief that a single commonality between complete strangers obliterates all descrepancy between geography, wealth, relationship status, social standing, personal + professional obligations, and fame itself.)
There were points in my listening experience of Wildflower where I start to argue with Drew (I argue with podcasts and audiobooks on a regular basis the way my dad used to do with radio talk shows and my grandmother continually did with TV). Knowing her dysfunctional background, I don’t blame her conclusion that it was personally empowering for her to start “buttoning higher buttons” and dispense with her “wild child image,” but, in the petulent way of a hardcore fan, I did not need this from Drew Barrymore, the woman who taught me I could rip the dress off, fuck buttons! Oh well. We can all live our lives, and where Drew didn’t have nearly enough parental attention and grew up without boundaries or rules, I, a congenitally disabled female born into a culture that already valued fragility over independence in women, had far too many adults watching over me at all times, scared of everything, doing it all for me, petrified that I could fall, which I very-occassionally did, but kids without disabilities who simply play out their own sense of adventure fall all the damn time. If your head ain’t hit, it’s not a big deal, but I came to that lesson as an adult.
Drew and I balance each other out beautifully in the short-lived but phenomenal netflix series, The Santa Clarita Diet, in which a [spoiler redacted] that turns unsuspecting people into zombies also happens to bring out their true natures. In the case of Sheila Hammond, rapturously played by Drew, this means that a suburban mom and real estate broker goes from a fairly timid head-down do-what-you-gotta-do practical type to a shamelessly libidinous adorer of all sensory pleasures, including but not limited to the unparalleled satisfaction of some crunchy human ears as a snack, and all manner of human organs as a meal. (She’s an endlessly kind and even selfish individual so the whole needing-to-eat-people thing is a conflict, but she and her adoring hottttt husband figure it out, in, incidentally, one of the most realistic and heartfelt portrayals of actual marital partnership I’ve seen on-screen since early Roseanne.)
Through all the madness, Sheila, like Drew, remains a suburban mom who does her job. And the role represents an ideal Jungian integration between the “wild” qualities that brought her where she is and the suburban mom that, as is clear in her memoir, she is deeply grateful and happy to be. Gratitude and happiness always radiated from Drew, though, at least as far as what the rest of us usually witnessed from the outside. I had a heartwarming conversation, once, with the dental assistant in Salinas, a woman with whom I didn’t have a whole lot in common on the suface. She was surprised that I didn’t prefer the TV on while I was getting treated (I told her I like to stay present with what I’m experiencing and I don’t blame her for looking at me askance), and when she asked me what I watched at home, I had just discovered The Santa Clarita Diet.
I didn’t realize I’d had the preconcieved notion that she, as a native Spanish speaker who was older than me, wouldn’t have a connection to a huge-in-the-90’s relentlessly-American girl like Drew, but when I mentioned the name, her face lit up. “I love Drew Barrymore!” she exclaimed. “She’s been through so much!” Every real fan knows that truer words were never spoken, so, having thought intently while doing the dishes of her struggles and triumphs as I’d been listening to Wildflower, I ventured to voice one of the most maternal thoughts I’d ever had. “I know it sounds weird,” I said. “But I’m just so proud of her.”
“Yes, me too!” she said. This was unexpectedly vindicating, as I hadn’t expected her to understand, but this is what happens when fictive relationships go on for years. Maybe Rob Fleming is a more hopeful character than I’d initially thought.